Posted
by
timothy
on Sunday April 19, 2009 @04:42PM
from the layers-and-layers dept.

Mathiasdm writes "The Invisible Internet Project, also known as I2P, has seen its 0.7.2 release (download). I2P uses multiple encryption layers, and routing through several other computers to hide both sender and receiver of messages. On top of the network, regular services such as mail, browsing, file sharing and chatting are supported.
This release (and all of the releases since 0.7) is at the start of a new development period, in which the I2P developers wish to spread the word about the secure network. This new release includes performance improvements, a first edition of an experimental new desktop interface and security improvements (by limiting the number of tunnels a single peer can participate in)."

When last I used it seemed that I2P has a whole network of ".i2p" domain things that you could only access if you were a part of the I2P network.Tor is just a proxying service is it not?I think it's something like if Tor was a private network that only Tor users could access.

I've been using I2P on-and-off for quite a while, and it is way faster than 2Kbps. BitTorrent over I2P can reach speeds of 50KBps and it could probably go faster if there was a mature BitTorrent client for I2P. Latency is low as well. Overall, I2P is much more usable than TOR.

I don't know IIP, but I2p has a darknet, like freenet, but also allows routing to the internet like tor. It's just as slow as any of the other onion routers, but combines good bits from freenet and tor.

I2P creates an entire seperate (though visible) network that allows tcp transport where it is impossible to connect an I2P address to an IP address. It is easy to tell who is using I2P but not what they're doing on the network. I2P also (or at least used to) includes a proxy out to the full internet. I2P is usable but often times fairly slow (mostly because alot of sites are hosted on people's cable/dsl systems).

Invisible IRC only works for IRC, and nothing else.

Tor is more of an anonymizing proxy than an entire seperate network. It's anonymity isn't quite as good as I2P, but in general, you'll get much better transfer rates to the regular internet through tor than I2P.

Freenet is another approach to anonymous network, but is implemented closer to a searchable, distributed, highly redundant, encrypted filesystem. It is anonymous, but only really allows publishing and reading of content, and it is pretty much impossible to have real time (or even close) communication with it.

I2P only encrypts and anonymises the transport. It's up to you to host the services on your machine. I2P just means people can use those services (e.g. a webserver) without knowing who is hosting them, and without you knowing who is accessing them. IF you go off-line, your service goes offline too.

Freenet, on the other hand, does have an encrypted and distributed data storage layer. You can go off-line and your website will remain available.